Besmirching Celebrity

Society needn't bother itself about abandoning all standards of decent behaviour on its own. It can simply sit back and ogle the bad works of those whom they place on the pedestal of popular celebrity to do it for them. The pity of it is when young people look to those celebrities in admiration and as a pattern of how they may themselves envision living an envious life replete with the satisfactions of success and fame and royalties.

Pity that it's social slumming in a very real sense.

The most recent examples of failures to communicate civilly and with due respect one for the other is the misalliance of two young and popular American singers. The names of Chris Brown and Rihanna are familiar to older people only because they see their grandchildren downloading their songs from the Internet onto their iPods.

Without which, presumably, their lives simply remain unfulfilled dreams, absent of glowing musicianship.

Eyes glued to the photograph of a swollen-faced, sad and well-pummelled young woman whose possessive jealousy provoked her boyfriend to assault her and leave her in a public venue to be rescued by passersby, police and ambulance attendants. The young man - any man, young, old, possessed of far greater physical strength than any woman, young or old, simply expressed his ire.

A loud accusing female voice claiming infidelity, and in spite having the intolerable nerve to toss the keys of a man's prized automobile is just looking for trouble, is that the message? Actually the message to any woman who suffers the indignity of a loud threatening voice from someone who professes to love her, let alone the violence of an upraised hand, should be to depart, quickly.

And conclusively. Don't look back, don't listen to abject apologies, don't double-think, don't forgive because it was a momentary lapse. What was momentary can so readily become habitual, and what was slight can so often result in brute violence of a kind so unrehearsed and unrestrained that it becomes fatal.

But isn't that the thing with women? They're so needily forgiving, so forgetful, so willing to give him "another chance". And then there follows a sad succession of "other chances" until the relationship builds to a crescendo of ongoing, relentless violence with the woman captured in a web of fear and accustomed victimhood.

This is misfortune at the most basic and primitive level of relationships, a man and a woman attempting to make a life for themselves, but failing abysmally because one or both are unable to recognize and to practise decent, respectful and loving relations. But there are always "reasons"; an abused childhood is one handy excuse.

And when the violated, beaten woman's own father reflects that there may be forgivable extenuating circumstances, what then can the woman do but rely on her father's kindly paternal advice? Where's her mother in all of this? The way things are...?