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LOVE IS NEVER HAVING TO KNOW HE IS WRONG: The Limits of Loyalty in the Case of Michael Jackson

 

 

 

 

For those of us who remember or who have heard the famous lines of mush from “Love Story”, they seem now—I’d dare say at least to most of us—a bit ridiculous. They go, “Love is never having to say you’re sorry.” Of course that isn’t right; it can’t be.

Now that we have heard so much about the courage, the truth and the necessity of owning up to imperfection, we are conceivably more prepared to face imperfections in those we love as well. In fact we tend to face disappointment more frequently with and by those we love because in general we are more vulnerable to the letdown.

When we mythologize another person that is quite different.

We put them or see them on a pedestal and there is no place for them to fall but very far down. Celebrities are sometimes provoked to plummet by jealous bystanders. Sometimes they are dissected mercilessly by media vultures who come out to play after the celebrity has collapsed or died.

I honestly had not paid significant attention to accusations of child molestation against Jackson more than a decade ago. Perhaps this was because I was in ways thrilled by his music, his dancing, his electricity even as I was quite removed from his very huge and very involved fan base. Part of my detachment from the accusations at the time, may be due to the possibility that I didn’t want to disturb my own internal and unconscious need to protect his status, no doubt sensing the extraordinary vulnerability he seemed to have. Certainly he was fragile as I see it now, and given my being a psychotherapist, I no doubt would have been otherwise inclined to notice a guy who seemed comfortable only with children.

The HBO documentary “Leaving Neverland” is to me a carefully piece carried out with integrity. I have heard Michael Jackson say that anyone who would insinuate he would harm a child, must be evil and out for no good. I have seen myself, starting to be mesmerized by the seduction of Jackson’s words that conveyed a couple of things: One seemed to be the sense of “You have to believe me, I am hypnotizing you in this process”. The other seemed to be “You have to believe me; I couldn’t bear it if you didn’t”.

I understand the felt need to protect a fragile celebrity who is fundamentally weak and brittle. In my own family of origin my much older brothers were in the arts and I admired them at the same time that I could in spurts see their own moodiness and unhappiness. I lent myself to not letting myself see how self-involved my parents were. They were the boat that was carrying me somewhere and I couldn’t quite afford to acknowledge the instability of the ship amidst rocky waters. Michael Jackson’s current accusers worshipped and really loved him. They could also not quite afford to see the increasingly explicit sexual acts he performed with them as abuse. And they both felt responsible for doing harm also to him (as he had warned them would happen) should they reveal the truth of what was going on.

There is absolute loyalty to another person no matter what or there is enough loyalty to the truth in the relationship. My own kids, who were much less needy of supporting authority or celebrity, taught me to question the very notion of loyalty being an absolute value. Everything should be open to question and for sure should be open to the truth. One of the ways we love our children is to be loyal to their truth or a truth pertaining them even when it is inconvenient.

Michael Jackson may have “loved” children but he was too narcissistically self-absorbed to be able to really be considerate of their mental and physical health. Michael Jackson didn’t love these two boys, now men, with enough loyalty to being honest or allowing for their honesty. He made it clear, in fact, that the truth would ensnare all of them, punish them all forever, and certainly ruin Michael.

We are now the audience, the viewers, in some way the jury. If we sense that our own obligation is to let the truth in even when it punctures our own experienced need to protect narcissistically wounded people in our own life, we will try to process the complexities. As we work at being loyal to the truth, we will not insist on declaring the innocence of someone who clearly was a pedophile.

The men who have come forward deserve our loyalty. Whatever damages they are awarded, they will never compensate for the damage done to their beings, and to those who love them.

Michael Jackson’s musical brilliance doesn’t end and isn’t cancelled. What may have to be cancelled, though, is any contract any of us ever felt to hold up his integrity—an integrity he happened not to be capable of sustaining.

#michaeljackson

#leavingneverland

#celebrityworship

 

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Will the Truth Matter in the Testimony of Michael Cohen?

 

 

A good friend asked me today if I believed the immensity of the testimony of Michael Cohen would have a similar effect on the American public as Watergate did. As a millennial, she asked with hope and suspense, something of me who had lived during the Watergate period. Why this is important is obvious to me, in that during the Watergate hearings much of the country was horrified, mesmerized, and galvanized in the watching of testimony that shocked and appalled many people. People wanted the details of the truth in fact, and seemed to settle for nothing less.

I told my friend I didn’t think so and talked about why that was.

Nobody (as I recall) said John Dean shouldn’t be listened to because he was going to get a plea deal. There was not yet the relativism about truth that we see today. If someone had evidence and it was seconded and affirmed again and again, well there was reason to believe the testimony.

I was not a Republican during Watergate, but I realized that people from any side of the aisle were frozen in disbelief and worry. The press was still sturdy in that you could get a fair share of fair mindedness wherever you looked. Of course there were conspiracy theorists but not to the extent we have this phenomenon today.

I have heard the Republican Party line in public be something like: Well, of course Michael Cohen is lying; after all he is a liar and has even confessed to lying before. He wants the three-year sentence to stand rather than the potential 70-year sentence he could have gotten if he didn’t testify. Nobody, as I recall, said lead witnesses in Watergate who had previously sworn loyalty to Nixon and lied about their own activities should be dismissed out of hand because they too were trying to limit their own prison sentences. In essence nobody said you couldn’t trust the testimony of someone who lied and who rescinded the lie in favor of the truth.

In a concise book called On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt (Princeton University Press, 2005) he called to mind Viggo Mortensen’s rendition of Tony Vallelonga, the Italian American who was security guard at the Copa before he became chauffeur to the African American musician Don Shirley, as portrayed in the recent film “Green Book”. In the movie Tony brags about being a superb “bullshitter”. When Dr. Shirley questions his apparent lack of shame in view of his being a liar, Tony clears this up, insisting he is not a liar. He is rather a “bullshitter”, someone who “just” convinces people to do what they don’t want to do. Frankfurt would agree with Tony’s self-assessment, I am pretty sure, because he distinguishes the bullshitter from the truth teller and from the liar.

According to Frankfurt, a liar knows he is lying or at the very least considers false that which he is saying. The honest person is telling the truth or at least perceives that to be so. The bullshitter, however, cares neither about truth or for that matter lies, at all, only about getting his or her way. Wow, this seems very relevant to today. In fact it feels like we have entered an era in which the actor voted the best not only wins an Oscar, but also the vote of the people. All one has to do is cast aspersions about the witness, and that is enough to call the person a liar and dismiss his/her offerings. That’s enough to discredit both the witness and possible facts, facts we need to have if we aim to move towards real democracy. Facts, if not taken to be important, are like a fragile disappearing species inhabiting less and less of human discourse.

A committee of some, on either side of any of the arguments today, can get together and at the very least probe for the discovery of what is true, if it can be known. Even if the truth is unpleasant to many, there are things we can do to work with it without trying to break each other down.

My hope, and perhaps it is a hope against hope, is that a majority of Americans will want the truth, wherever it lands. And that most people will want an honest President—at the very least someone with respect for his/her constituents, his/her job, and for reckoning with the truth as well.

 

 

 

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Finally Old Enough to Share

Of course I’m old enough to share. I have the age, still for some months of 72, and my hair is white.

But it’s not sharing as in children being told to share that I’m talking about. I am referring to the wish to share, the enjoyment of sharing, and the pleasure of sharing particularly because the experience is authentic.

I have been talking lately about identifying with cranky kids, who often pick up on something in the environment being off. They can’t articulate what is wrong, and even knowing clearly would be controversial because the child is so dependent on his/her parents, caretakers and authorities. It can be scary to know too early that the people you are supposed to trust are too shaky, too angry, and too fragile to be reliable.

We cling to adaptations that can hide, even from ourselves, how unwise it can be to share our deepest selves. At the same time we can lose touch with what that even means. When we feel constrained to measure up to standards that seem foreign but may be accepted in the wider culture, we wind up playing make believe. When I write a paper in economics that I don’t understand, but the teacher really likes the author of the book he assigned, I also make believe. When my English professor in Brooklyn College decides to flirt with me by saying the C+ he gave me was obviously a mistake since my next grade was an A-, we keep the game going.

I can share in my marriage and with my kids. I can’t share all my neediness with my kids, and marriage—well marriage is a hard one. This is because in some cases, in my case, it takes us so long to know enough of ourselves to not blame each other for our incompleteness. It takes so long that we—in my marriage– are still learning.

At the same time, in my work there is greater freedom, greater ease, greater relaxation. I feel, without always realizing it that I can be myself, because there is a community of us—people who feel like outsiders, people who have been cranky or are now. I don’t put a sign out looking for these people but they come to me; they seek me out. They hear I’m honest, or that I’m unconventional or out of the box.

I worked for 30 years on Long Island and now that I’m in Colorado I miss those years. But in truth I miss the people; I miss the community. I miss the fact that many people who came to see me craved my honesty, and my sharing with them what I saw and how I saw. It wasn’t idyllic; cranky people can take their crankiness, well you know, out on a therapist. And of course then there are the leavings, the fact that people move on and get better enough to leave. And even if they never leave, they leave a certain kind of adaptation, a certain level of dependency that may seem grating at the time but that becomes a distraction from my own inside.

And then there are the leavings because we all change and grow and grow older, and I move to Colorado (the New Yorkers says, “What? “Why on earth?”) but there is the grandchild there and the husband who feels ready to retire even though I still don’t know what that word even means.

Changing lanes and locations, makes more dramatic a certain kind of loneliness that has never really properly gone away. It is that outsider thing, the cranky thing. It’s also wanting not to hide or feel ashamed of what I have picked up on even though in the early years the crankiness was a cause of criticism, and on my part some shame and doubt. And actually it’s not only about sharing: it’s about introducing some ideas I’ve been working on and seeing if collaboration can be possible.

In writing my book The Human Climate (2019) I think I may finally come of age. I’m finally sharing what I’ve come to but with the added accessory: I’m daring to say that there is a human climate that needs to be attended to, that I know this, that I’ve studied this. I know about this, even if I am not the academic researcher and even though I can’t win debates easily if at all.

Sharing can be daring—a rhyme that was unintended at its inception. The easiest way to share is when there are people waiting to welcome you. Or when it is clear that other people want what you have to offer and appreciate both the offer and you.

Sharing when you and what you share interrupts the steady flow of sameness, will not necessarily call out the welcome wagons. And yet it can nudge the potential kindred spirit, and it can call forth someone who is aching to share on the same level as well. It is often like making the first step to reach out, unsure of what the response will be.

And finally–finally, it feels that whatever the response, I have a right to what I know. And while it may feel deflating to feel rejected, I can really appreciate that even a rejection or encountering people too busy to pause or to care, doesn’t have to cancel out that I am ready to share nonetheless.

At the same time I realize, though I suppose it’s pretty obvious, that being ready to share does not mean the other person is ready. It takes two to tango and two to share, at least two. So maybe being ready to share also means working to understand what may be going on with the other person who says no.

One more thing that is a process.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Failing to Pass the Political Correctness Test with “The Green Book”

What a drag it is to feel I have to confess to the powers of political correctness, that I really liked the movie “The Green Book”. I have found several of the rather snide reviews that seem to abound, both snobbish and condescending. I saw the film today and in it I saw people changing inside and with each other. I didn’t feel self-congratulatory as a white person, or that all was well in the world of race. Just because people have some moments of humanity together doesn’t mean we white folks have to congratulate ourselves or think all is now okay.

It isn’t. Racism is sadly still very alive and was never solved. However that doesn’t negate the fact that sometimes between human beings hatred is interrupted and even transformed. I resent anyone implying that my liking the movie makes me stupid, insipid, easily seduced or just wanting to think I’m wonderful.

Racist? I know I am, I have gotten to know that part of me better over the past years and still have to work it. The movie didn’t make me feel good about myself; it just made me equalize the playing field of life for a couple of hours, as happens in any good film, or good novel, or real authentic human encounter. I liked it a lot. I empathized with the white driver and the black pianist (both played exquisitely by way by Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali). I liked the fact that the relationship they had seems to have changed each of them.

I tend to resent critics in general because with the turn of a hand, whether by pen or computer, they can ruin the run of a work of art that might have taken great pains to come into existence. When I was blogging for Huffington Post I interviewed James Earl Jones who was then starring in the Broadway version of “Driving Miss Daisy”. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/carol-smaldino/finding-what-drives-us-th_b_785292..

As described in that piece, I found something very deep in the play and in the performances. At the same time I noted that the New York Times critic minimized the play as “slender”; it was a kind of kiss of death for its popularity.

As a white liberal I have also suffered from what Robin Di Angelo has called “white fragility” https://www.huffingtonpost.com/carol-smaldino/white-liberal-racism-an-i_b_1156548…

I had been raised on the idea that as a Jewish liberal who was “for” civil rights I was immune from the tag of racist myself. That, I am seeing more and more, is not the case. I assumed I was not one of the bad guys taking advantage of my white privilege. I was wrong and want to bring whatever increasing awareness I can, to the table.

America in general had not been a place conducive to reparation. Sometimes it has not been conducive to an awareness of how much cruelty and brutality there has been towards many kinds of people and minorities. At the same time I do not want to be treated cruelly because my heart was moved by a movie. I do not want the critics to assume that I am any more racist, because I saw the two protagonists as in need of some knowledge and genuine bond the other could supply. I suppose that I’m saying I want to rebel against the easy categories. And I want to be less bruised by critiquing that can seem so absolute and fancy: I want to take it less personally as well. I want to question the authority of anyone dictating taste with such apparent ease.

A propos of “fancy” I have this term I use as I refer to “ceilings and basements” to describe this. It means that much advice, criticism, standard setting, is done on what I call the ceilings, where many of us live much of the time in the messier arenas I refer to as the basements. I don’t think the airy ether of ceiling judgments helps anyone. I think we need the room to examine our loves and hates, our prejudices and to admit when our hearts are tugged at (I know, don’t end a sentence with a preposition).

Instead, I want to wonder out loud at the glib superiority of some critics, and the harm they do in making the readers and viewers cringe in shame rather than becoming freer in their own honesty. Okay, I mean freer in our own honesty, freer to feel the true feelings that we have.

We need richer dialogues about racism in America– where there is real listening and real learning and owning of difficult emotions and experiences, and history. For now, I don’t think a dialogue about race in America will be helped by glibness on any side at all.

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To Life and Hope, to the Birth of a Book on the 18th

 

 

Ok, you’re right. It’s not just any book; it’s my book. And my free—ish association goes to the song lyrics, “It’s my party I can cry if I want to”. And maybe this says something about the connection between joy and sorrow, at least in my life, and in ways, my book as well.

I like the association, and it’s a bit like my idea of “talking out loud” (I have a whole chapter on this subject). Talking out loud, internally or externally, can lead to new thoughts, or old thoughts that become available, and much more. And for now the notion that I don’t have to have just one set mood is freeing.

Okay, so you ask, what is the title of the book? Okay, already, I’ll tell you. It is The Human Climate: Facing the Divisions Inside Us and Between Us; and Dignity Press is publishing it. Another point that has proven important to me is the number 18 in the date of publication. At first I hoped it would be the beginning of 2018. What a kick, to have a book come out on January 18th of 2018. And I admit, it might have even been a thrill to have a book be out by 2008, since I was already at work on it. But alas, even if the book is small (130 pages if you’re asking), the process and progress went in fits and starts, the latter day vision and version as much a shedding of other books and manuscripts that had to be discarded if not forgotten, as anything else.

I am coming to the number 18. The website Thought.Co says something about the number 18 in Judaism, and yes, you’re right, I use it because I am Jewish, but perhaps you could already tell by my way of talking—at least in this particular missive. Written there is the following: “Because it means ‘life,’ the Chai is consequently a symbol that captures an important aspect of Judaism. For Jews, Chaim (the plural form of the word) symbolizes the value of life and the hope that supports it. It also represents the will to live and serves as a reminder to the Jews to live and protect life.”

There is a reference to the use of multiples of the number 18 used as money gifts for Bar and Bat Mitzvahs and other occasions which in some way merit or call up the association. And I am pretty sure many of you are familiar with the term “L’Chaim” whether from a toast or from “Fiddler on the Roof”, or both. It has a happy connotation, the idea of toasting to the positive, to the possible.

I probably have more superstitions than I even know of and I can’t exactly claim the good luck of 18 being one of them. This is because I think of it as more of a wish than any assuming of good luck. The luck feels more something present in the doing, the having– the owning of the experience.

There are so many things that no book will do, certainly for me. This book, for example, is shorter than I thought it would be. It took me longer than I thought it would (I confess I just typed in “older” instead of “longer”) and yes there is the fact that I would have wanted to be younger when my one big (emotionally so) book would in fact come into being.

And yet maybe I can take advantage of the momentum of that number 18 coming up any second to wish myself some of the aspects of life that can be good. For one, I can wish for the book (and myself in so doing) that it be what it is, who it is. I can wish that I be who I am as much as possible in what I write about the book and its content, and what I say about it as well. I can admit to the book being a reflection of how I think and feel and write, even if it will not meet the criteria of those more studious than me. And I can admit to the fact that I put lots and lots of blood, sweat and tears into this, even if at moments it feels too thin for that to be true.

I can thank the book and the process for reinforcing the limitations of any and all of us, in realizing that any book—to me at least—that I would write, would be bound to be a beginning. I didn’t know this really, at the book’s beginning but I’m compelled to realize it now. I can only write what I can, as the person I am, in the context in which I live, bound by my prejudices even as I work to modulate them with more awareness and the capacity and will to pause in the middle.

I hope you will join me in partaking of coming to know what lies in this book, but at the very least I thank you for looking at these words that testify to the dignity of my attempts.