VLVL children, sex, Tube

[pynchonoid]

Frank Rich's column in today's NY Times is worth
reading as counterpoint to Vineland:

FRANK RICH 
America Tunes In for the Money Shot
Published: November 30, 2003

[...] Mr. Jackson's sole entertainment value for some
time, in other words, has been as a freak. To say that
we care about him now because he's a celebrity or a
pop star or an alleged criminal is to sanitize both
his real appeal and the audience's sleazy complicity
in his spectacle. People are turned on by the Jackson
story because it's about sex, specifically pedophilia,
at a time when the sexual fetishization of children is
not limited to whatever may or may not have happened
at Mr. Jackson's ranch. If a mass audience can fixate
on whether or not Britney Spears, a singer first
marketed as a devoutly Baptist schoolgirl, has lost
her virginity, it is no wonder that the Jackson
sideshow would move to the center ring and become a
main event.

So if anything of value is to come from this circus,
let's drop the pretense that it is about something as
lofty as the American system of justice or even the
lure of fame. This is a base morality tale with no
heroes. The Santa Barbara district attorney, Thomas
Sneddon Jr., used Mr. Jackson's arrest as an
opportunity for showboating before the cameras,
cracking a joke about the jolt in sales tax income the
media presence would mean for his jurisdiction. The
public, while purporting to be outraged by the crime
of child abuse, is hypocritically slobbering over
every last speculative pornographic detail used to
fill in the supposed contours of that abuse; cable
news ratings immediately shot up by double digits. And
those who are now taking to the public stage to intone
gravely about pedophilia in the Jackson show are often
trading in titillation themselves; you haven't lived
until you've heard Larry King bandy about the word
"penetration." 

[...] The hour's anchor, Harry Smith, opened by
referring to Mr. Jackson as "a middle-aged man accused
of an almost unspeakable crime" — almost unspeakable
but not quite, as it turned out. The first interview
subject was a 9-year-old Neverland visitor, now 17,
who was asked, "Who decides who gets to sleep in the
same bed with Michael?" and "How many at a time?"
Though the boy didn't see his host "getting aroused,"
we were assured, this unfortunate lack of a money shot
was rectified for viewers soon enough, when a private
eye filled us in on the "great detail" to be found in
a legal document's description of the singer's
genitals. CBS, you may recall, is the same network
whose C.E.O., Les Moonves, described its recent
pulling of the mini-series "The Reagans" as a "moral
call" predicated on the principle that networks are a
"public trust."

"There are certain things that even people who buy
everything won't buy ads in, and child abuse has got
to be at the top of that list," Jon Mandel, the chief
global ad buyer for MediaCom, said to Bill Carter of
The New York Times when discussing CBS's cancellation
of the Jackson entertainment special. But there was no
shortage of advertisers when CBS broadcast "48 Hours
Investigates" on Saturday night at 8 — the best time
to reach children parked in front of a TV set by
babysitters. J.C. Penney, Pizza Hut and RadioShack,
pushing a toy tie-in for the "Cat in the Hat" movie,
were all on tap. The only more lurid TV show that they
could have sponsored that night occurred two hours
earlier on MTV, where the definition of the "lewd or
lascivious acts" of the singer's arraignment was
spelled out, complete with the appropriate bodily
fluids. [...] 

....read it all:
<http://nytimes.com/2003/11/30/arts/30RICH.html?pagewanted=all&position=>



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