Rape, Murder, Molest…Who Cares! Rape, Murder, Molest…Who Cares! Just Entertain Us. Steve Kattula (skattula@yahoo.com) I have seen the future: Michael Jackson, O.J. Simpson, and Roman Polanski are walking hand in hand to the cheers of millions. They receive their collective "Forgotten Entertainers" award. The crowd buries them in a sonic wave of adulation. If pessimism holds true, that future isn't far away. After some time off and out of the limelight, not only forgiveness, but also glorification of these creeps has begun (especially with Michael Jackson). To a vast majority of society, these are infamous (umm…bad guys) folks. But at the same time, each was at the pinnacle of their respective entertainment field at one point. Society has begun to equate "forgiving" what we view as an awful act with both forgetting and even rewarding. Does it have something to do with the value we place on being entertained? On Wednesday night, Michael Jackson came out from years of avoiding stage performance with a dance to highlight the N'Sync performance. He couldn't have garnered a louder round of applause. The next day, MTV host Carson Daily fielded a call on "TRL" that was critical of Michael for his probable past actions. He answered, "Can't we forget what he did in the past …because when Michael Jackson walks out on stage everyone is just like, 'yea'[pumps fist]!." The audiences inside and outside couldn't have been behind his 'heartfelt' incomplete sentence more. What Mr. Daily said was important, and representative of the frightening attitude that many seem to be displaying in the case of "The Gloved One". That attitude is: we're going to ignore the fact that you slept with young boys because your value to us as an entertainer outweighs even terrible acts we believe true. They are willing to let 'x' action slide(when they believe 'x' to be both wrong and true) because he/she can give them 'y' entertainment value. Lawrence Taylor exhibited the same attitude on the same day while being interviewed on Howard Stern's radio show. He talked candidly about playing golf with O.J. Simpson and just laughed about it when Howard sarcastically, calculatedly and repeatedly brought up the point that O.J, in all likelihood, murdered two people. 'L.T.' jovially replied, "we just don't talk about that." Howard brilliantly went on with sarcastic O.J. questions (again demonstrating what separates him from his copycat hacks-the ability to apply meaningful sarcasm) to a shockingly unbothered Lawrence Taylor. The way Howard was going about the interview was pure genius. In joking with LT, he sarcastically pointed the finger at the very topic I'm going off on here. In answering, LT chose not to defend the actions of O.J, but rather imply that we should just "forgot about them" merely because it was "cool" to hang out with O.J. He even went on to state that O.J. had mentioned many times that he wants to play golf with Howard Stern! L.T. didn't seem bothered one bit that Howard was sarcastically stalling just short of calling him an accomplice to murder! Similarly, Roman Polanski is starting to make a name for himself again as a film-maker with younger generation. But the younger generation is not being informed that Polanski was convicted for the statutory rape of a 13-year old girl and he fled to France from America to avoid prison. They just think he lives in France because it's "cool". There's no doubt that Polanski made great films, but society must also neither forget, nor avoid, nor ignore the man's past actions. As we learned in the first South Park Halloween Special, Hitler was evil, but also very charismatic and entertaining. The character 'Cartman' proceeded to happily imitate the vaudevillian antics of the small-mustachioed stage performer, and his classmates giddily globbed up Cartman's spirited showmanship. Was this really any different than Carson Daily? And speaking of Carson, his answer should have been, "No! Of course we're not going to forget that Michael Jackson never quit the Boy Scouts!" By the same token, no one…NO ONE should be golfing with O.J. and then bragging about it if you agree his murdered his wife! And Roman Polanski's name should be forever stained like a toddler's first pair of underwear. I don't care how good Chinatown was! The novel Fatherland chronicles an a world where Germany never lost World War II, the charismatic and entertaining Hitler never lost office, and the world never found out about the Holocaust. The end of the novel details a detective finding the last relics of truth that these odious acts occurred when he finds the last remaining stones of a long-since dismantled Auchwitz. Let us not have a future where a puzzled archeologist is unearthing Neverland Ranch. This article inspired by David Lee Roth...the man with the gonads to tell it like it is, fool! To email the article you just read above to someone else {click here} .

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