America worships celebrities. Imbues them with power and privilege beyond what they deserve. I don't understand it; quite frankly, it's kind of sick. There are many more people in the world who are much more deserving of such adulation, and for much better reasons--say, because they are brilliant, or creative geniuses or humanitarians. I'm sorry, but being attractive and starring in cookie cutter movies that are created because they'll be box office hits (aka they'll make a shit ton of money), and not because they have any artistic merit, is not a valid basis for adoration and worship. People who are unsure of what they value, people who lack imagination or discrimination in what they consume, those seem to be the people who latch on to these make-believe characters we affectionately call celebrities in this country. It's kind of pathetic. Come on, people, at least become irrationally obsessed with people of substance!
Anyway, with that opinion in mind, I'm going to jump on the bandwagon with hundreds of other writers and put my two cents in about David Carradine, best known as Bill from the Kill Bill movies. I had my suspicions that he was a sexual freak before the more sordid details came out in the news. Probably because I've been culturally conditioned to expect and believe the most fantastic and dramatic of possibilities. If it isn't exciting and outrageous, our tiny American attention spans refuse to be captivated. Reality is never exciting enough, it has to be marketed toward us, embroidered and exaggerated. We don't want our reality to be real. That would be boring. And the enemy of rich Americans is boredom. I mean, everybody's got to have something to complain about. In other places, the chief complaint is... Extreme poverty. Starvation. Inadequate health care. Horrific crimes against humanity. Despicable human rights violations. The list goes on. But we don't live there, that only exists for us in a montage of pictures on the 5 o'clock news. For us, it's boredom. And more often than not, we get bored with those pictures anyway. That is, until the celebrity gossip section comes on!
But back to the point. I feel bad for Carradine's family. They are so embarrassed that they've hired Michael Baden (let's hear it for celebrity worship again), the famous pathologist, to perform a second autopsy, because surely he knows better than the other pathologist (the other pathologist doesn't even have his own TV show, can you believe it? And we believe him? Ridiculous!). Celebrities know best, after all. Carradine's family just doesn't want to believe that he accidentally died from hanging himself during naughty time. Who would want to believe that about their 72-year-old loved one? I wouldn't. I'd probably request a second autopsy, too, especially since the whole world now knows how he died and why. Thank you, media, for airing out these people's dirty laundry, even on such a solemn occasion as someone's death. But hey, the American people have a deep psychological need to know the nittiest grittiest personal details of celebrity lives. The media capitalizes on this again and again, and why not? It's a symbiotic relationship. You can't blame the media for anything without blaming the people who consume it. It's only fair. And on that note, I have to blame myself, since I too have found myself reading up on this nasty little story. To save face, I'll add that I first found out about this on BBC news, a "reputable" news source, as far as news sources go. Supposedly. I couldn't quite help it, even the Brits were beating me over the head with it. But anywayyy...
People love it. They love hearing shit like this about their gods. It makes them feel connected to them, I suppose. Or like their divine idols are human after all. And not just human, but sexually deviant humans, the best kind. It either validates their own tendency toward the kinky, or allows them some sort of catharsis by virtue of not being into bondage and asphyxiation. And of course, by being alive.
We love this story because it's darkly sexual. It's CSI come to life, and there's nothing cooler than when real life resembles fiction. In fact, reality is at its most real when it seems fake. I mean, look at Reality TV! Isn't that what life is supposed to look like? Okay, I've confused myself. I don't know the difference between reality and TV anymore. Wait, I've confused myself with hundreds of thousands of Americans. Dammit. New paragraph.
What I really wanted to say was... the family is embarrassed, but I think they should actually be very happy for David Carradine. He went out doing something he loved. He died the way Shakespeare meant it when he wrote about "dying." That is, to orgasm. I don't know about you, but I can think of way worse ways to die. Fire. Drowning. Car accidents. Cancer. Aids. The list goes on. At the risk of sounding irreverent, I would say that I, too, hope to die in mid-orgasm. In fact, I'm not sure it could get any better, unless I died saving somebody's life or something. Alas, the likelihood of such a pleasurable death is slim, since I don't choke myself during naughty time. But you never know.
I'll keep my fingers crossed.
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