Man. It's been a long time since I've updated this thing. Well, I'll get right to it...
NOTE: For the abridged version of this entry, please scroll down.
A few weeks ago, a dear friend of mine asked me the following question:
"How do you feel about the current situation with one of your favorite TV shows Jon & Kate [Plus 8], plus the intense media scrutiny that followed all of the dramatic events?"
So I answered his question with quite a lengthy reply that I decided I would use as the basis for this post...which will be longer. The topic is one which I have considered on several occasions to write about in my blog. It's something I feel pretty strongly about. I suppose I just needed a push. So thank you, dear friend of mine. I'm not keeping his identity a secret for any reason. It was Louis. Louis O'Neal.
Several years ago, I came to the sudden and now seemingly obvious realization that the tabloids, celebrity gossip, and talking about celebrities' personal lives and attitudes with my friends is considered backbiting. Before I go any further, I should perhaps elaborate a bit on my own personal understanding of backbiting, a topic which I find to be infinitely fascinating.
In the Bahá’í Writings, there are an incredible number of quotations on the subject of backbiting. I would like to share a handful of them to help frame my discussion of media scrutiny.
Abdu'l-Bahá states:
“The worst human quality and the most great sin is backbiting, more especially when it emanates from the tongues of the believers of God.”
(Quoted in Star of West, Vol. IV. p. 192)
The worst human quality! Most great sin! That’s crazy!
Bahá'u'lláh goes on to say:
“Backbiting quencheth the light of the heart, and extinguisheth the life of the soul.”
(Bahá’u’lláh: The Kitáb-i-Íqán, p. 193)
“O Son of Being! How couldst thou forget thine own faults and busy thyself with the faults of others? Whoso doeth this is accursed of Me.”
Extinguishes the life of the soul?! Accursed of God?! That’s intense! And you may be thinking to yourself, “I’m ok, I don’t backbite.” But if you are a passive listener to other people’s backbiting, you are also doing yourself a disservice. Abdu'l-Bahá expands on how the hearer is affected:
“If any individual should speak ill of one who is absent, it is incumbent on his hearers, in a spiritual and friendly manner, to stop him, and say in effect: would this detraction serve any useful purpose? Would it…be of any possible benefit to any soul? No, never! On the contrary, it would make the dust to settle so thickly on the heart that the ears would hear no more, and the eyes would no longer behold the light of truth.”
(Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha, p. 230)
Wow.
So those are just a few examples of how seriously I take backbiting. So as I was saying, one day I realized that celebrities were people too. They have souls just like the rest of us. They are also innately spiritual beings, just like the rest of humanity. I wouldn’t like to talk crap about a friend, or judge the decision of a friend’s friend that I never even met, so why would I want to discuss the private lives of a celebrity? Once I truly took this to heart, it became a lot harder for me make any kind of serious or extreme commentary about a celebrity. It created a certain amount of moderation in the way I spoke about movies and actors and actresses and the like.
I’ll give an example. After the original The Fast and the Furious came out to much success, there was obviously talk of a sequel being made. By this time, Vin Diesel had made several other films and gained quite a reputation. I read somewhere that he was asking for $30 million to sign on for it, and that’s why he was not in the sequel. I believed it, and even changed my view about Vin Diesel, who I had liked up to that point. However, now he was too cocky and greedy and I didn’t like that. What a terrible thing to think about a person after reading just a few sentences about them. Didn’t even bother looking for the source or anything. Just believed it. Fail.
Now I stay away from celebrity news of all sorts. I still read about films and film development news, but I try to stay away from the articles that have to do with their personal lives or what store someone was seen shopping at, or who made out with who, or who beat up who. It doesn’t matter. Additionally, don’t actors’ acting just seem better when you DON’T know much about their personal lives? I don’t think that it’s just a coincidence that some of my favorite actors also tend to keep their private lives private. Robert DeNiro, Kevin Spacey, Christian Bale, Matt Damon, George Clooney, Clive Owen, Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, and Johnny Depp, just to name a few.
And if I do catch something, which I inevitably do, seeing as how the backbiting industry is literally EVERYWHERE, I try to keep whatever I read or saw away from what I think of the actor. So I don’t get the people who all of a sudden turned against Tom Cruise after he had a few awkward interviews and decided they didn’t like his movies either. Or just cause he’s a Scientologist. What? How does that make sense? He’s still the same awesome actor. Or that whole Christian Bale rant against the cinematographer thing. Seriously? You’ve never cursed out or yelled at anyone in your life? Then the media gets and runs with it and everyone who reads about it or sees it on TV in shows devoted to this stuff like Access Hollywood, Inside Edition, Entertainment Tonight, Extra, just about anything on E! or VH1 these days, and even CNN (why is it even on CNN to begin with?) forms an opinion and judgment of you. That’s just rude, dude.
Which finally brings us to Jon & Kate Plus 8. A relatively new kind of celebrity; ones from a reality show. They’re even more ordinary than the ordinary celebrities that get their faces splattered on magazines everyday. So how do I feel about that, you ask? I feel sad. The same sadness I feel when there’s news of any couple who, whether I know them or not, gets a divorce. Divorces are always sad. Especially when there are kids involved. So my thoughts, when I see their faces all over the magazines stacked at every check-out aisle in every store I go to is: “What do those 8 kids feel like right now?” How does it feel to go into a grocery store and see your mom and/or dad’s face on a magazine with words and quotations attributed to them that are probably made up, saying that they hate each other, or that their dad is having an affair? Most recently I saw “Jon’s a dirtbag” in huge letters over his picture. That’s heavy stuff. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody, and most definitely not on anybody’s kids.
If you agree with what I say, here are a few things to keep in mind when reading or watching news related to celebrities:
1) All or at least part of what you are reading is false, an exaggeration, or a misinterpretation of what actually happened
2) There is absolutely no way that anyone can know exactly what happened, except for those were there when it happened, even then, you don’t know what those involved were thinking when it happened
3) There’s no reason why anyone else should want to know what happened because these are human beings we’re talking about here, involved in their human lives just like everyone else
ABRIDGED VERSION: Backbiting sucks! Celebrities have souls too!
Whew, all this talk about backbiting is getting me down, so I’ll end with a quote about how amazing it would be if we didn’t backbite:
“If, however, a person setteth about speaking well of another, opening his lips to praise another, he will touch an answering chord in his hearers and they will be stirred up by the breathings of God. Their hearts and souls will rejoice to know that, God be thanked, here is a soul in the Faith who is a focus of human perfections, a very embodiment of the bounties of the Lord, one whose tongue is eloquent, and whose face shineth, in whatever gathering he may be, one who hath victory upon his brow, and who is a being sustained by the sweet savours of God.”
(Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, p. 230)
That’s good stuff.
…keep moving forward
