You People Need Help

So there's this video floating around Facebook...the one, the only Justin Bieber's CSI episode, wherein I guess he's shot dead. I would know this if I followed pop culture or Justin Bieber; I trail along miles and curves behind the one, and wouldn't recognize the other if he showed up at my door ushered by whatever rapper it is that ushers him around.

My wife does the pop culture following in this house, and she is dismissive and a tad contemptuous of the Bieb, given that she was born in Saint Ratford, as she calls it. "I was here first," she says.

Dismissive and contemptuous I understand. Actually cheering a re-enactment of his death? Not so much.

I was in therapy for a while in my early teens. I don't remember what landed me there. It probably boiled down to my folks not understanding me. I don't blame them one bit, considering that I can count the people who consistently understood me on the fingers of one thumb, especially back then. What I recall most distinctly about my therapy sessions was the growing disconnect between the therapist and me. He kept asserting, and trying to prove, that I did not understand the difference between fantasy and reality. This was, and is, total bullshit. I told him as much every way I knew how. My problem at the time was that I didn't really know too many ways how.

I could turn that accusation--he doesn't understand the difference between fantasy and reality--on the legions of (mostly) guys who have lustily cheered the completely fictitious death of completely fictitious character Jason McCann. After all, to a man, they're acting as if it's the actor, not the character, who is killed. Moreover, I'll admit to being a little frightened of a person who finds the death of another human being...a human being whom he has never met, and who has never harmed him in any way...to be an event worth cheering.

Justin Beiber is merely the latest example in a catalogue that stretches back through the Jonas Brothers, the Backstreet Boys, probably back to Paul Anka and beyond. Doubtless if Elvis Presley were just starting out today, there'd be legions of male haters to go along with the adoring multitudes. Is it jealousy, I wonder? Do people really hate Justin Bieber because of his prepubescent posse? How pathetic would that be? Guys: most of the girls with Bieber fever are far too young to even look cross-eyed at. You know that, don't you?

These people who cheer at "Justin Beiber"'s death by gunshot, though--do they really bear the real Justin Beiber ill will? The Facebook "I Hate Justin Beiber!" fan club is instructive. There are over seventy thousand members in just this one forum, and the first thing I saw when I look at that Wall chilled me. "I burned a Justin Beiber Teddy bear and picture today. It felt SO good." And what did you think while you were burning that bear and picture? You didn't think--even for a second--about engulfing Justin Bieber himself? Naw, of course you didn't.

And they told me I had trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality.

The so-called problem with me when I was a teen was my visceral hatred of violence. It didn't matter where the violence showed up: in real life or on television. Apparently it was perfectly okay to have a problem with real-life violence, but imitations on a screen, no matter how graphic, are hunky-dory. Under quite a few circumstances they're supposedly funny. Hahahaha, you could die laughing.

I have never found pain funny. I have likewise never found pain sexually arousing. Pain is pain. It hurts. It's never funny when it's you, is it? Here, let me punch you in the face and then laugh at you. You'd call me a monster, and rightfully so. But it's fine if you watch it happen to somebody else on a screen. Why? Because it's not real? And yet it's shown to you as if it was. They go to great lengths to ensure verisimilitude. Why bother?

I'm not a Justin Bieber fan. I've heard exactly one of his songs--One Less Lonely Girl is on heavy rotation on one of the channels at work--and found it about as mindless and mediocre as most pop music today. But I don't hate the guy. On the contrary, I respect him tremendously. Here's the first YouTube megastar, a boy who's parlayed an accidental discovery into millions upon millions of dollars. You tell me what's to hate about that, because quite frankly I have no idea.