On Oct. 22, 2009, Dennis Prager had Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on his radio to talk about his new book "The Michael Jackson Tapes."
Shmuley: "You and I have had endless conversations about fame. You are very open about how you were never bit by the fame drug. For the vast majority of our culture, fame is what we live for…. The life of Michael Jackson was a tragic window into the price that people pay for fame, how it cuts you off from the people who love you and may want to criticize you to curb your excess. Fame was Michael’s drug of choice.
"In this book, Michael talks about how he never had a childhood because he was taught to be an attention-seeker at such a young age. The Jackson Five performed in places such as stripclubs when Michael was five. The price he paid for fame…demanded his life…
"Michael reached for higher things in life but fame held him down because his management always told him that what was most important was his brand. Whenever he sought to consecrate his fame to a higher cause, he was told and he came to believe that it got in the way of his fame. By becoming ubiquituous, if he went to charity events, I took him to Oxford University, to Carnegie Hall where he gave a major lecture about parents need to spend more time with his kids… His management consistently told him that that kind of ubiquitousness would undermine his mysteriousness and he would be less famous."
"I believe that what killed Michael was the absence of purpose in his life. When the whole purpose is to get people’s attention, then what? If you can’t consecrate your fame to a higher cause like Bono did, your fame becomes a burden. Bono is married 25 years to the same woman. His name has become synonymous with third-world debt relief. When you can’t do that, your fame becomes a burden.
"People are not created to be worshiped, to only have adulation. The beauty of the Hebrew Bible is that everyone is flawed. Michael was surrounded by so much adulation it was impossible to crack through it so he could make the changes necessary in his life."
"Our childhoods are becoming more and more broken. Our parents are working longer hours… They come home without energy and they veg in front of the TV. Attention is a substitute for love. We feel love when we get attention. Little do we realize that we are not loved for what we are but we are loved for what we do. Love makes you strong because it validates your being. Attention makes you weak because it validates your doing.
"That’s why Michael Jackson died. Most of the stories that made him so weird in the public’s mind — walking around with a giraffe, Bubbles the Chimp, sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber — were done purposefully to get more attention. It was attention at any cost. But Michael Jackson woke up one day and he said to himself, ‘Ohmigod, people think I’m a weirdo. I want to be taken seriously. I want to be speak for important causes.’ But nobody would associate themselves with him. This was well before the child-molestation charges. I never believed them. He had destroyed his name with all this strange stuff. In Michael’s case, it was clearly because he had no childhood. He was on the stage from the age of five. He had no normalcy."
Dennis: "People don’t feel alive if they’re not on television. That validates their existence. I don’t think it is so much a pursuit of love as it is of validation."
Shmuley: "Everyone wants to matter. When you walk down the street and people notice you, you feel like you matter…. The validation that comes from fame is artificial and it doesn’t last and leads to self-loathing. After a while, you know that all these people who love you don’t even know you."
This slays me because it is so true for me. While my mother was dying of cancer during my first four years and I was moved around a dozen different families, something got broken. I did not bond with my parents. My mom was dying. My dad was busy looking after my mom. I got left behind.
So I grew up thirsty for attention. As long as I can remember, I’ve longed for attention. I’m wired to think — what can I do or write in this moment to get the maximum of attention?
This is destructive. I wrote on the pornography industry in part because I figured that was the way to get the maximum amount of attention.
When I build up the semblance of a normal life, normally through Orthodox Judaism and bonding with families therein, the attention-seeking beast within me is somewhat stilled.
