Jackson, Noteworthy passings and celebrity deaths

There's something offensive about the notion that some lost lives don't count and others do, but as a matter of news judgment editors assign such values all the time. We tend to have different principles about it.

In some US media, the death toll from the US invasion of Panama was 23, as only Americans counted. That was the extremist treatment.

More to the middle-of-the-road, most Panamanian media --- including this medium --- treat it as far more newsworthy when a cop is killed in the line of duty than when a gang member is killed in some sordid violence over drugs or turf.

And then there are the celebrity deaths, which are one of the symptoms of a diseased attitude about fame and fortune in general. Am I the only one who sees something pathological in all the attention that Michael Jackson's death is attracting? I know that I'm not, but it does seem lonely being an editor who doesn't find this to be a compelling tale.

The singer was talented, and his Thriller album was a watershed in many ways, including how it was used to racially integrate MTV programming, after in the early 70s a more concentrated entertainment business resegregated popular music radio. The guy was also despicable, and while it was never proved beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law that he was a pedophile, to me the preponderance of evidence indicates that he was. It just shows what most open-minded people who have known a few murderers will know, that while plenty of evil circulates among and within us, there are very few completely worthless individuals among the human race.

If one cares to understand the pathology --- which is a very different thing from excusing it --- the moral of the story will surely have something to do with the destructive effects that fame in the entertainment business have on many people, and particularly upon those who become celebrities as children. The wealth that comes with success in the big-time entertainment business shouldn't buy a different standard of justice for celebrities, but very often it does. On the other hand, public figures should have a right to private lives but this is very often disrespected. The celebrity syndrome can be injurious or deadly to those caught up in it and those around them.

Celebrity is also a great distorter of democracy. People knew Martha Reeves by her songs and as one of the Motown artists who stayed in Detroit when Berry Gordy fled to Los Angeles. If her name was Martha Robinson or Martha Schlabotnik nobody would have paid much attention, but Motown fame propelled Martha Reeves to the Detroit City Council, where she has said and done little of importance as the declining city has borne witness to a string of municipal political scandals. But the name recognition of celebrity being what it is, it was Reeves rather than Robinson or Schlabotnik who was given the opportunity to lead that she squandered.

Meanwhile in New York, a prominent scholar who grew up in the slums of Curundu and went on to be a department head in the City University of New York system has passed away from the complications of diabetes. George Priestley did more scholarly research and published more books and articles about this country's race relations than any other Panamanian of our time.

The local celebrity makers, such as they are, didn't make Priestley famous. Actually, they would have liked to make him disappear. His last article, which he co-wrote with activist Alberto Barrow, is about black organizations in Panama at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century. It will be published posthumously in Souls Journal and it pretty much accuses former first lady Vivian Fernández de Torrijos of racism.

Señora Vivian, of course, is the daughter of Tony Fergo, who founded this country's ad agency cartel, a bastion of white power in mostly non-white Panama. The controversy in question was about a political ad of Vivian's that portrayed crime as a matter of a young black man attacking a white woman. However, for many years before that argument Priestley had been a stern critic of the prevalence of white models in Panamanian advertising and of white faces on Panamanian television. Yes, one can talk about Lucy Molinar or the hip hop shows, but the pervasive message that most Panamanian girls get not only from advertising but also from the popular entertainment that the ad cartel agencies choose to patronize is "white is beautiful and you're not, so you're not."

Priestly objected, as he was wont to do, often in brilliant fashion. So no celebrity for him, not much of a forum in Panama for his research or the conclusions he reached based upon it, and virtually no discussion in the corporate mainstream Panamanian media of the issues with which he dealt. Functionally illiterate teenage hoodlums who manage to get themselves shot down on the streets receive more attention from the Panamanian mainstream press than Priestley got when he left this world.

To see so many of the Panamanian media play up the demise of Michael Jackson while ignoring George Priestley's passing is insulting to many people on many levels. The bottom line --- a matter of national survival in the long run --- is that Panamanians need to stop taking the word of the ad agencies and the media that they feed about what's important and who's noteworthy. There are some good people working in Panama's national media, but those who call the shots want us to forget this nation's heroes and worship foreign celebrities, even notoriously perverse ones. Never should we allow another election where the ad moguls set the agenda.

The bottom line? People here, and everywhere, need to distinguish the concepts "hero" and "celebrity." These things are far from synonymous.

opinion