Fewer reasons to “feel good”

I’ve decided recently that I’m not a big fan of death. Is there anything worse? And by that… I’ve decided recently that I’m not a big fan of death. Is there anything worse? And by that I don’t just mean the idea of people dying and it being really sad and having to go to funerals and all of that business – although that is a lousy thing to have to do – I mean that dying tends to absolutely ruin the public image of people foolish enough to engage in that sort of behavior. Let’s look at James Brown to see an example of what I’m talking about.

Poor James. Though in recent years he had become more famous for unflattering mug shots and out-of-control, high-speed police chases than music, he was still, indisputably, the godfather of soul and the hardest working man in show business. That both of these sobriquets were slightly past tense even when he was alive wasn’t really a problem. If anything, his legacy always acted as a counter to his present musical endeavors that weren’t up to the level of his mid ’50s to mid ’70s catalog, works that were outstanding in their originality, energy and precision. So he had a problem with the drinking and the driving, the beating and the drug-taking, but, as the Houston Chronicle noted in his obituary, “His reputation, musically at least, was safe.” He then, however, had the temerity to die and, with that decision, the gates heaved open.

His wife is now appearing on the cover of tabloids and crying during interviews on the gossipy television rag “The Insider.” His will is in debate, and lawyers are probably oozing out of every available surface by now, sensing money as efficiently as a polar bear can smell seals – I just learned that the distance for that polar bear-seal thing is an amazing three miles away! Incredible, huh? Can you imaging being able to smell anything, much less a seal, from three miles?

But to get back to James Brown, it just sucks. When he was alive, it was easier to ignore all of the not-so-great things he did and focus on all the actual great things he did. His death, however, stops me from viewing him as this amazing singer and turns him, depressingly, into an everyday person who has problems. All the things that made him magical melt into the air and what we are left with is the tragic fact that James Brown was simply human and, therefore, no better and no worse than the rest of us.

Which sucks. I don’t want my celebrities to be real people. I want them to be crazed distant deities, whose actions are never explainable and thus always fascinating and always obsess-overable. And then death robs them of that distant, glamorous shine and replaces it with humdrum humanity instead.

Which brings me to the point of this column. Have you ever seen that movie “Logan’s Run?” It’s a terrible dystopia from the ’70s – when it seemed the only way to imagine the future was to imagine it unbelievably messed up – and in it, society suffers from severe overpopulation. The solution to this is to let everyone live a life of wildly hedonistic excess and then, when each person turns 30, he or she has to commit suicide in some big machine in a weirdly loving way. I think that this film offers a real solution to the problem of celebrities aging, dying and embarrassing themselves.

We kill them all off. That’s right, every celebrity. Once they hit a certain age, boom! Into the weird, oddly loving embrace of the suicide machine. It’s tough, I know, the Lord knows I’m not denying it, but sometimes you have to be tough. Famous people always mess up their legacies when they live too long. All that money makes them crazy, and then they do something stupid. Plus, most people usually don’t have a burst of steam in the latter half of their career anyway. All the suicide machine would do is ensure that. If we had put James Brown into the machine after 1973, what would we have lost? “Living in America.” I think we would all be able to sleep without that particular anthem.

Of course, there would be considerations made and stuff like a grandfather clause would be inserted, so that people who were celebrities before the suicide machine wouldn’t get screwed. That wouldn’t be fair. One should always know what one is getting one’s self into. However, for everyone who signed up after the machine, that’s it. Thirty? Bang! Into the machine! This way things won’t get so messy, and the public will never have to deal with the embarrassing fact that celebrities are real people who aren’t just their songs, movies and TV shows. Here we would be able to enjoy them entirely as if they were constructed and composed solely for our pleasure to consume, and we would never have to see them be actual people with actual problems.

Let’s hear it for the machine!

If you can smell seals from any distance, even if only a quotidian 10 feet, please e-mail kjs34@pitt.edu.