(Anonymous guest post)
The Greatest Love of All ... is self-delusion in many cases. Back in the mid-80s, a lot of American parents were looking for easy answers to the complex problems of life. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll were FAR too messy and dangerous for the narratives that Nancy Reagan's "just say no" army was telling itself. Conservatives wanted to believe that we now lived in a post-racial society, and that any problems with race or class were due to inherent laziness or criminality (like Reagan's famous comment about "welfare queens"). "Just look at the Cosby show," they'd say. "Blacks are successful and upper-middle class now, so we can stop talking about racism." They bought into all the surface sheen and the bright, flashy colours and kinetic videos on MTV with kids bopping their heads to the great pop music of Michael Jackson and Madonna. Whitney Houston represented everything that was successful and happy and MORNING IN AMERICA Reagan-approved. Her song about loving yourself was held up as an ode to drug-free living and self-determination. When in contrast to these wonderful cultural things happening all around them in this wonderfully post-racial, post-class, post-drug utopia that surely we were all moving inexorably towards, many American children were beginning to experiment with cannabis and rejecting the joys of family and bright sunny attitudes and stable, unflashy all-American jobs that were helping us defeat the Godless Soviets. Drugs and art were messy, dangerous and corrosive to the American family dream! They led to sex and dissatisfaction; to differentiation and rejection. As long as Whitney Houston could get on stage and tell them everything they wanted to hear, they were unable and unwilling to dig beneath the surface, to see the turbulence and violence that swirled beneath the sheen of the technicolor 808 thump. It created a schism within them between what was real and what was experienced. And anything that challenged the authority of their comfortable illusion was suspect. They were on the wrong side of history. People think that the Reagan America won the cold war, but nothing could have been further from the truth. While Nero's fiddle played, AIDS devastated the gay community, civil rights victories were rolled back, corporate savings and loans looted the treasury, and illegally funded wars devastated entire countries. It is hard to look unflinchingly at the shadow side of humanity, and escapes are seductive. They are also temporary, and you will always wake up the next morning to deal with the fall-out until you just don't wake up. Today Whitney Houston is not here to wake up and deal with it any longer. I believe the illusion that she had to partake of at various times in her career was a more destructive force than any of the drugs. She put a pretty face and a beautiful voice on top of a diabetic coma inducing, media-deployed hypnotic drug. And most Americans wanted to drink this Kool-Aid. Only the real, the lived, the messy accidents and near-misses of being fully alive can pull you through. Everything else is sleep-walking.
The Greatest Love of All ... is self-delusion in many cases. Back in the mid-80s, a lot of American parents were looking for easy answers to the complex problems of life. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll were FAR too messy and dangerous for the narratives that Nancy Reagan's "just say no" army was telling itself. Conservatives wanted to believe that we now lived in a post-racial society, and that any problems with race or class were due to inherent laziness or criminality (like Reagan's famous comment about "welfare queens"). "Just look at the Cosby show," they'd say. "Blacks are successful and upper-middle class now, so we can stop talking about racism." They bought into all the surface sheen and the bright, flashy colours and kinetic videos on MTV with kids bopping their heads to the great pop music of Michael Jackson and Madonna. Whitney Houston represented everything that was successful and happy and MORNING IN AMERICA Reagan-approved. Her song about loving yourself was held up as an ode to drug-free living and self-determination. When in contrast to these wonderful cultural things happening all around them in this wonderfully post-racial, post-class, post-drug utopia that surely we were all moving inexorably towards, many American children were beginning to experiment with cannabis and rejecting the joys of family and bright sunny attitudes and stable, unflashy all-American jobs that were helping us defeat the Godless Soviets. Drugs and art were messy, dangerous and corrosive to the American family dream! They led to sex and dissatisfaction; to differentiation and rejection. As long as Whitney Houston could get on stage and tell them everything they wanted to hear, they were unable and unwilling to dig beneath the surface, to see the turbulence and violence that swirled beneath the sheen of the technicolor 808 thump. It created a schism within them between what was real and what was experienced. And anything that challenged the authority of their comfortable illusion was suspect. They were on the wrong side of history. People think that the Reagan America won the cold war, but nothing could have been further from the truth. While Nero's fiddle played, AIDS devastated the gay community, civil rights victories were rolled back, corporate savings and loans looted the treasury, and illegally funded wars devastated entire countries. It is hard to look unflinchingly at the shadow side of humanity, and escapes are seductive. They are also temporary, and you will always wake up the next morning to deal with the fall-out until you just don't wake up. Today Whitney Houston is not here to wake up and deal with it any longer. I believe the illusion that she had to partake of at various times in her career was a more destructive force than any of the drugs. She put a pretty face and a beautiful voice on top of a diabetic coma inducing, media-deployed hypnotic drug. And most Americans wanted to drink this Kool-Aid. Only the real, the lived, the messy accidents and near-misses of being fully alive can pull you through. Everything else is sleep-walking.
One could argue that the fall of the Berlin wall was the trigger that allowed the descent into imagined reality - no other adversary to weigh your morals or values against meant the values were no longer useful or needed - only greed remained. That boat has sailed, but we're still paying for it.
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