Celebrities Behaving Badly: All Of A Sudden Justin Bieber Doesn’t Look So Bad

In a week where that found Ray Rice doing a Floyd Mayweather on Janay Palmer, Roger Gooddell doing a Stevie Wonder on the elevator tape, and Oscar Pistorius getting an OJ on Eva Steencamp, it’s tough to get particularly exercised about the Biebs stripping down to his Calvins after getting booed at the “Fashion Rocks” show .  In fact, smoking dope on the tour bus, egging the neighbor’s house in Beverly Hills, and peeing in a mop bucket while muttering “Fuck Bill Clinton” all seem pretty tame when compared to assault and battery.

But I’d be remiss if I didn’t share what would otherwise be the celeb scandal of the 9/11 week: In some fancy filming, the rumored Iggy Azalea sex tape has been all but confirmed by the pop star in question.  Iggy went through the usual progression of outright denial followed by denial of culpability (“if it exists, it was shot without my knowledge”) followed by threats of litigation and ending with claims that it may have been shot while she was a minor. I don’t know about you, but I’m shocked that there could be any graphic images of a poet who could create lyrics like these: “It go fly bitch, fly shit, and got these ho on my dick And if I could have one wish its that I die rich”.  Who’d have ever figured?  Anyway, assuming that the tape is verified, and Iggy has enough tree rings showing to certify that she’s older than 18, Vivid Entertainment has already offered seven figures for this piece of rock history.  Coming to a video download service near you before Halloween.

With all that happened this week, it’s hard to remember back to Joan River’s funeral last Sunday.  Now, finally, the text of Howard Stern’s eulogy has been released, and the King of All Media didn’t disappoint.  He and Joan had been friends since the mid 1980’s, and I’ve heard Joan on his show many times, so I know for a fact that she’d have been thrilled to be memorialized thusly: “Joan Rivers had a dry pussy.   Joan’s pussy was so dry it was like a sponge – so that when she got in the bathtub – whooooosh – all the water would get absorbed in there! Joan said that if Whitney Houston had as dry a pussy as Joan’s, she would still be alive today.”  If he’s available when the time comes, I think I’d like Stern to do my eulogy as well.  If he wants to talk about my dick, I’m going to leave him just one instruction: Lie.

Also under the classification of “keeping it classy”, Lady Gaga also appeared at last week’s New York Fashion Week.  While performing a set at the Plaza Hotel on Friday night, Gaga stopped in the middle of her second song when the crowd was talking over her vocals and growled, “Will you fucking shut up?  We’re playing some jazz.  Goddamn rich people.”  Headline in next day’s NY Post: Pot Calls Kettle Black (not really, I made that up).

Two more sports travesties of note: Again, portrayed against the background of Ray Rice sucker punching his then fiance’, everyone else’s various abominations are a whole lot less abominable.  In particular, you’ve got to shake your head and roll your eyes over Cleveland Brown wide receiver Josh Gordon, who was initially suspended for the whole season after testing positive for THC a second time.  In a case of too little too late, the NFL has reconsidered their draconian drug policy and reduced Gordon’s suspension to eight games (half the regular season).  This is the same league that at first slapped Ray Rice with a two game suspension when they saw the “caveman drag” video of Rice and Palmer.  So here’s the deal over there in gladiator central: Beat the living crap out of your girlfriend and lose a couple of paychecks, or mellow out a little like roughly twenty or thirty million other Americans and kiss your season goodbye.  Seems sensible.  One more scandal from the boys club that is the NFL is the sexual assault lawsuit against Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who was already embarrassed by the photos of him surrounded by strippers already released.  Professional football?  Strippers?  Sexual assault?  Pretty much as common as peanut butter, jelly, and Wonder Bread.  But this was Texas, so the only missing element is an automatic weapon.  Stay tuned.  That part of the story is sure to follow.

While we’re on the topic of sexual assault, let’s not leave out Cee Lo Green (who “The Voice” was more than Happy to replace with Pharell), whose appearance at a music festival in Alabama was cancelled in the wake of his no contest plea to slipping a little somethin’ somethin’ in a lady’s drink in 2012 prior to having sex and his subsequent tweet of  “Women who have really been raped REMEMBER!!!”  No, Cee Lo, I imagine that what most women remember of sex with you (once they regain consciousness)  is the lingering stench of rotting garbage.

Just in case you hadn’t heard:  Neil Patrick Harris (well deserved Emmy for best portrayal of a heterosexual pussy hound by a gay man in a sitcom) wed his longtime partner, David Burtka, in a ceremony in Italy (I’m pretty sure it was not officiated by the Pope).  And Fran Drescher (repeatedly overlooked by the academy for best portrayal of a Jewish American Princess by an actual Jewish American Princess in a sitcom) married the guy who reputedly invented email (no, not Al Gore), Shiva Ayyadurai.  Her mother is still disappointed…he’s not a doctor.

Finally, the story you’ve all been waiting for…in fact, the story I’ve dreamt of for half a dozen years: In the embodiment of “Trailer trash is as trailer trash does”, Sarah Palin’s whole family was ejected from a birthday party in Anchorage after her daughter Bristol (poster child for the benefits of contraception and bane of DWTS fans everywhere) threw half a dozen punches into the face of an unfortunate partygoer.  In the part I love best, Mama Palin was heard to exclaim, presumably as she was escorted off the premises, “Do you know who I am??”  In answer to your unasked question…yes, alcohol was involved.

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Ray Rice, Roger Goodell, Oscar Pistorius, And Michael Brown: Shoot First And Ask Questions Later

There is so much outright lunacy, injustice, and criminal stupidity in the air this week that I don’t really know where to start, or how to weave it all together, but it seems as if we’re gripped by some kind of global virus clutching at our neurons and snapping at our synapses,  urging us individually and collectively to march in lockstep over the lemur cliff of our own schizophrenic death wish.  What the hell is going on?

After what seems like another endless two-year tortured OJ spectacle trial, Oscar Pistorius has dodged the biggest deadliest bullets aimed his way.  Would that Reeva Steenkamp had been so lucky.  Pistorius was found not guilty of murder or even manslaughter after blasting away through the bedroom door at what he claimed to be an intruder.  Defense attorneys everywhere must be laughing in their bloated retainers, thanking the gods and the founding fathers and the jury consultants for the cherished stronghold of “beyond reasonable doubt”.  This is the ultimate example of “money talks and bullshit walks”.  Pistorius was wealthy enough to hire the best defense team money could buy.  When he killed his girlfriend in his own bedroom, there were only two witnesses, and one of them left in a body bag.  I’m reminded of the legendary Racehorse Haynes, a defense attorney famous for his acquittals of wealthy River Oaks socialites and doctors in Houston in the 1970’s.  With Racehorse defending you, you could literally be caught with a smoking gun in your hand and a bleeding body at your feet, and still, “the first one was free”.

The Pistorius case supports my contention that turning a blind eye toward violence against women is not just an American sickness, but a global pandemic.  Face it, if Ray Rice had cold-cocked Janay Palmer outside the view of a video camera, he’d still be suiting up for the Baltimore Ravens tonight on Thursday Night Football, and the commentators would all be lauding him for being the fastest toughest meanest little bulldozer to ever line up beside a quarterback…and that’s even if his girlfriend had shown up in an emergency room looking like the victim of a three-care pile-up.  It’d be “he said she said” and what she said would be roundly dismissed, because, hell…she probably had it coming to her anyway.  I’ve seen multiple comments in multiple blogsites suggesting that there are always two sides to every story, that Rice must have been provoked.  The apologists are all over the airwaves and internet.  Even Indiana Pacers star forward Paul George got in on the shameful defense of Ray Rice with tweets like:  “I don’t condone hittin women or think it’s coo BUT if SHE ain’t trippin I ain’t trippin..Let’s keep it movin lol let that man play!”  Boxer Floyd Mayweather chimed in with: “there’s a lot worse that happen in households. It’s just not caught on video, if that’s safe to say.”  Please note that Mayweather has himself been convicted of domestic violence and currently is being sued for another assault on another woman.

And what I said two days ago about the NFL not being truly concerned with this epidemic of domestic abuse (along with multiple other violent assaults in various bars and strip clubs and parking lots) is being proven absolutely accurate.  Roger Goodell can shuck and jive all he wants, but it’s clear that the NFL did have the elevator tape, and they had it months ago, and that their overweening concern was with putting butts in seats, not with players putting butts on the tile.  I’m with Keith Olbermann on this: Goodell should NOT resign…he should be summarily FIRED.

Pistorius isn’t the only one to get away with murder, and Ray Rice isn’t the only one benefitting from the rationalizers, apologists, and violence junkies.  You’ve got your mysogynists and your racists, and sadly, some of them aren’t wearing spandex and pads, but blue uniforms with a badge.  What with elevator-gate,  Ferguson, murdered Michael Brown, and officer Darren Wilson have fallen out of the 24 hour news cycle.  Brown’s been dead for nearly a month and Darren Wilson has been heard from exactly zero times while he’s on paid leave.  How do you suppose that grand jury inquiry is going?  In recent days, two more witnesses have come forward with descriptions of Wilson firing round after round into Brown while Brown faced him with his hands up, one saying Brown was walking slowly forward and one saying Brown was falling forward as he was shot. Anyone wanna bet that Wilson is exonerated with a “justified shooting”?  Just wait.

And by the way…we’re going back to war.  Not just Iraq this time.  Syria.  Nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan.  Schizophrenic death cult lunacy.

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Ray Rice And The Cult Of Cruelty

So TMZ came up with the elevator video of Ray Rice delivering a devastating left jab to the jaw of Janay Palmer, knocking her out cold.  If this had been Floyd Mayweather, and it had been another boxer instead of a woman in a cocktail dress, every commentator in America would be praising the fighter’s blinding hand speed and jittering defensive posture…float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.  Face it, we worship violence in this country.  We pay thousands of dollars to be ringside when guys like Mayweather beat the living shit out of other sweating warriors wearing nothing more shorts and grimaces.  We support teams like the Ravens paying guys like Rice tens of millions of dollars because we all stand up and scream like birthing women when Rice drives some hapless linebacker to the turf like so much paper mache’.  There are some people in this country who have such a love affair with violence that they proudly parade through grocery stores and churches and restaurants with a Glock on their hip and a Bushmaster on their shoulder, and their implicit message is, “Just give me a reason, motherfucker, just give me a reason.”  When balaclava clad lunatics in the desert post videos of beheadings, we bemoan our shock and horror at the barbarism, but then follow with bloodlust of our own.  I saw a post on Facebook yesterday with the heading “When Americans Are Beheaded, There’s Only One Proper Response” posted over a photo of a B-2 Stealth Bomber releasing a full payload of bombs…as if the women and children blown to literal bits by those weapons aren’t just as violated and terrorized and irretrievably dead as the poor fuckers with the knives at their throats.  Our horror and outrage at violence is matched only by our insistence on and fascination with violence.  If you have any doubt, just scan the TV ratings on any day of the week and note that if we aren’t watching a blood-soaked meth cooker, we’re absorbed with hords of brain-sucking zombies or watching roughly twenty versions of CSI, NCIS, SVU or multiple other productions that glamorize various forms of savagery and mayhem, and then applaud the avenging savagery and mayhem of the agents of what we continue to call “civilization”.  Civilization in this context seems to constitute “the guys with the bigger guns and the better aim”.  So, let’s not be so fucking shocked and disappointed when a guy who we as a society pay to be a thug acts like a thug.  It’s not that we shouldn’t be appalled and angry, and it’s not that there shouldn’t be severe and immediate consequences, but let’s just drop the facade of gentility and admit that we are all complicit in some small way.

Is the NFL complicit?  Damned right it’s complicit.  When Roger Goddell and the Ravens management saw the initial video of Rice dragging his unconscious fiance’ out of an elevator and dropping her on the tile like a bag of potatoes, they hit him with with a two-game suspension and stern rebuke.  What the fuck did they think?  That Janay Palmer had fainted in there and Rice was getting ready to call the medics?  They needed to see the actual punch before they canned this sack of shit?  And TMZ could get the elevator tape, but the multi-billion dollar juggernaut of the NFL settled for, “Sorry that’s unavailable at this time”? The NFL doesn’t want to discipline guys like Ray Rice.  The NFL has another thousand guys just like Ray Rice.  We call it “roid rage”.  NFL coaches call it “a nice hit”.  Raven’s coach John Harbaugh’s response to the new video was emblematic of the whole NFL attitude in its disingenuous laughability: “Everything I said in terms of what I believe, I stand by. I believe that still,” Harbaugh said. “I’ll always believe those things and we’ll always stand in support of them as a couple. That’s not going to change.”  Really?  So Ray Rice is just a poor misguided souls who had a little isolated anger problem on a bad day at the casino?  You had no idea previously, and the first video didn’t give you a clue?  What utter bullshit.

And one more thing.  I don’t understand the response of Janay Palmer (now Rice) to her own victimization by domestic violence, but it’s not unique, and it’s part of the problem.  Here’s what she posted yesterday on Instagram: “THIS IS OUR LIFE! What don’t you all get. If your intentions were to hurt us, embarrass us, make us feel alone, take all happiness away, you’ve succeeded on so many levels. Just know we will continue to grow & show the world what real love is! Ravensnation we love you!”

“I woke up this morning feeling like I had a horrible nightmare, feeling like I’m mourning the death of my closest friend,” Janay Rice wrote. “But to have to accept the fact that it’s reality is a nightmare in itself. No one knows the pain that the media & unwanted options from the public has caused my family. To make us relive a moment in our lives that we regret every day is a horrible thing. To take something away from the man I love that he has worked his ass off for all his life just to gain ratings is horrific.

Look, this problem is bigger than Ray Rice, and it’s about more than just domestic violence.  It’s about the glorification of violence in every part of our society, whether condoned or condemned.  It goes all the way from social media bullying to urban gangs to police brutality to Grand Theft Auto to “boots on the ground”, and until we somehow address the disease itself, we can’t profess to be surprised by the symptoms.

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