It’s hard to stump Michael Moore when he’s surrounded by his regular cheering section. Alone, he is a fool.
I wonder—if no one listened to Michael Moore, would he cease to exist?
12
Desperately Seeking Sanity
MADONNA
Dr. King, Malcolm X, freedom of speech is as good as sex. And if you don’t vote, you’re going to get a spankie.
—Madonna, in bra and combat boots, rapping in a public service video, 1990
I’m coming from a point of view now, from experience, so I can help people, share what I know. I think of everything I do, ‘How is this going to affect other people? What will they get out of this? Am I adding to the chaos of the world? Am I part of the problem, or the solution?’
—Madonna, in top hat, to Harpers & Queen, November 2005
MADONNA. THE MATERIAL GIRL. The Material Mom. Madge. Mrs. Ritchie. Slut. Whatever you call her, it cannot be denied that few in history have accomplished so much—she’s catapulted into an international cottage industry through movies, music, books, and her own naked body—with so very little. Her rise to the title of world’s top-earning female performer is impressive. Less so is her head-scratching ability to convince audiences that she has something terribly important to say about politics, religion or world affairs, simply because this sexual savant can afford the biggest toys.
Madonna sprang onto the scene in the early 1980s, wriggling her sweetly pudgy form in Spandex and a crucifix, and has shaped herself into arguably the world’s most famous woman, raking in an estimated $325 million. Over the decades she’s evolved from an ambitious gal who acted out, ad nauseam, against her own sexual hang ups and perceived repression, to one who leaped into the body of a sinewy, tweed-wearing, British-accented stick-in-the mud obsessed with the Jewish mystical religion, Kabbalah.
Along the way, Madonna has undergone many earth-shaking personal reinventions designed to keep her in the public eye. She was a free spirit in her early film, Desperately Seeking Susan, a breathy bombshell playing opposite Warren Beatty in Dick Tracy, and a weirdly prudish hussy done up, nude and self-conscious, in bondage gear in her coffee table book, Sex. In her 1991 documentary, Truth or Dare, Madonna graciously admitted she was neither the world’s greatest singer nor dancer. And still, she became a bigger star than the world has seen.
Her props of choice are relics of her Roman Catholic faith, chiefly crucifixes and rosaries that she employs as sex toys. A 1989 video for “Like a Prayer,” featured stigmata and Madonna making out with Jesus. It lost the artist an endorsement deal with Pepsi, and brought down a rain of condemnation from defenders of the Catholic church. Which may have been the entire point. For a while, she held the power to make one wonder how far she’d go to shock.
Madonna Louise Ciccone—a second middle name, Veronica, was added unofficially at her confirmation—was born August 16, 1958, in Bay City, Michigan, the third of six children born to an Italian-American father, Silvio “Tony” Ciccone, and a mother of French-Canadian descent, Madonna Louise Fortin.
Madonna would be haunted for much of her life by the death of her namesake mother from breast cancer when she was just five years old. Her lack of a female nurturer is a theme that crops up, over and over, in her work. In interviews and song lyrics, she points to a strict, and possibly abusive, relationship with her father.
Later, Tony Ciccone married the family housekeeper, and had two more children.
Madonna attended the University of Michigan, dropping out after her sophomore year to pursue a dance career in New York City, arriving in town with just $35.00 in her pocket. She worked at Dunkin’ Donuts, and as a nude model. In 1982, she signed her first record deal. She was on her way.
In 1985, she married the actor Sean Penn, forming a disastrous union that dissolved into allegations of domestic violence (by Penn). Many other affairs ensued, but they always took a back seat to her career, which seemed to know no ceiling. It all climaxed, if you will, with Madonna’s coffee table book, Sex, and the album, Erotica, which at the time looked to be the biggest controversy of her life. She had no idea.
Sex, a volume hidden behind Mylar wrap and covered in weighty metal, retailed for $49.95, an exorbitant sum when you consider that ordinary pornography such as Penthouse or Hustler sold for less than one-tenth the price, and could be read with one hand. But Sex was promoted as an art book. It featured black-and-white photographs of a nude Madonna in all manner of poses, from bondage to something akin to prostitution. However, the images struck me as posed and decidedly unsexy and not very artful.
Madonna insisted earnestly that she rebelled against society’s sexual repression, a weight she said all women are forced to live under. It made me wonder—what the hell is she talking about?
By 1992, American women had the ability to take lovers and careers without repercussions. Madonna herself was proof of that. Also, AIDS had put a damper on sexual acting out. The repression she complained of in Sex seemed a personal problem best discussed with a trained therapist. Sex is now in demand as a relic of the era, but it did not do so well at the time.
Madonna had accomplished everything she’d set out to do, and more. At 38, she starred in Evita, playing Argentina’s first lady, Eva Peron, who died when she was but thirty-three. Then, four days before her forty-second birthday, in August 2000, Madonna gave birth to her second child, Rocco John Ritchie. She married his dad, British filmmaker Guy Ritchie, ten years her junior, later that year. Rocco joined a household that included daughter Lourdes, born out of wedlock to Madonna in 1996.
But for a standard celebutard, the bigger the star, the more compelled she is to align herself with the leftist cause du jour. Onstage at her top-grossing Confessions tour, she made obscene comments about President George W. Bush. At Madison Square Garden, she instructed fans to go out and see the film, Fahrenheit 911, in which her rotund celebrity pal, Michael Moore, blasts the administration’s war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“I don’t think I’ve ever cried so hard at a movie in my life,” Madonna said.
As she rounded the bend toward fifty, she’d lost the ability to shock. That didn’t stop her. Neither did bombing in a remake of the film, Swept Away, directed by her husband.
But Madonna still had one dramatic transformation left, and this renovation may prove her most remarkable of all. She was no longer tongue-kissing babes half her age, or rushing to remove her clothes. Rather, she was in a hurry to put them on. She wrote children’s books, none featuring pictures you’d ban from the kids’ bedroom. And most strangely, the woman from Michigan developed a fake English accent. She’d come a long way from her spankie days. Madonna was reborn once again. She turned into a middle-aged mom. Madonna gave a fawning interview to Britain’s Harpers & Queen in 2005, in which she revealed that she can be a tyrant to Lourdes, or “Lola.” Lourdes was barely nine years old at the time, and sharing a home with Rocco, the child of Madonna and step dad Guy Ritchie. Her own father, personal trainer Carlos Leon, was cast out of Madonna’s life shortly after she was born. It is unclear how much of a role Madonna allows Carlos to have in his little girl’s life, since his name never came up.
“I’m the disciplinarian, Guy’s the spoiler,” Madonna told the magazine. “When Daddy gets home, they’re going to get chocolate.” Evidently, not milk chocolate, as Madonna insists “We’re a TV and dairy-free house.” Whole grains, fish and vegetables are in. Ice cream and chocolate milk are definitely out at the Ritchie abode.
“TV is trash. I was raised without it. I didn’t miss anything,” she also said. “TV is poison. No one even talks about it around here. We don’t have magazines or newspapers in the house either.” This is the same gal who made a spectacle of herself, on TV, at the 2003 MTV Music Video Awards by sucking face with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. In the audience, watching approvingly, were Guy and Lourdes, who was then six, and done up in a white communion dress, lace gloves and a studded belt with the inscription, “Boy Toy
.” Madonna used to wear that male-bashing slogan around her own waist, long before Lourdes was even conceived. This tacky display was much commented on, but at least, for Madonna’s sake, Guy and Lourdes were able to watch Mom’s performance, in all its exhibitionistic, sapphic delight, live at Radio City Music Hall—and not on that poisonous TV.
To Harpers & Queen, Madonna said that when her children misbehave, “I take privileges away. The kids get to watch movies every Sunday, so if they’re naughty they get their movie taken away. They have to be particularly naughty for that one. If they’re just a little naughty, then no stories before bed.” But Lourdes was subject to the harshest treatment of all. When she fails to pick up her clothes from the bedroom floor, “We take all of her clothes and put them in a bin bag, and they get stuck somewhere, and she has to earn all of her clothes back by being tidy, picking things up in her room, making her bed in the morning, hanging up her clothes, stuff like that.” And if the kid staged a tantrum over which outfit to wear, “We have got down to one outfit,” said her mom. “She wears the same outfit every day to school until she learns her lesson.” Nine years old.
The woman who despises TV will also make an exception if it’s her own show, and it includes heavy doses of Kabbalah. “My ultimate goal is to have a TV series, and each episode would be about girls finding themselves in challenging situations.”
Madonna, the avid environmentalist featured on the cover of Vanity Fair’s “green” issue, raised an international stink in 2006, when she imported at least 1,000 pheasants to her British estate, Ashcombe House, so the birds might be shot to death. Each year, bankers, businessmen and celebrities including Brad Pitt paid more than $19,000 a day to partake in the fancy pheasant hunt. One would think this was beyond hypocritical that Madonna, purported lover of all living things, found herself standing between our feathered friends and being a member of the landed gentry. The hunt was discontinued only after Stella McCartney, designer daughter of Sir Paul, protested, proving that Madonna is nothing if not savvy about to whom she should suck up.
* * *
Madonna, the avid environmentalist featured on the cover of Vanity Fair’s “green” issue, raised an international stink in 2006, when she imported at least 1,000 unfortunate pheasants to her British estate, Ashcombe House, so the birds might be shot to death.
* * *
MADONNA TRIED, and failed, to conceive a second child with Ritchie. Natural motherhood off the table, Madonna, in gold-plated celebutard style, decided to take drastic action. She followed a trail blazed by the likes of Mia Farrow and Angelina Jolie, and turned to a path of self-reinvention that topped nearly everything that came before: she acquired a live toddler from the Third World.
It was October 2006. Fresh from the pheasant hunt, stories swirled out of Malawi, Africa, that Madonna planned to adopt a local child. It was said that she’d arranged to have twelve boys plucked from orphanages for her to choose from. That troubling image—with its overtones of picking a china pattern to go with the silver, or worse, lining up human beings for a latter-day slave auction—were largely confirmed later on. Madonna told Oprah Winfrey on her nationally televised TV show that she’d put together a list of alternates if her adoption “hadn’t worked out”.
But for the first few days that Madonna was in Africa, her loyal publicist and serial liar, Liz Rosenberg, vehemently denied that she was in the market for a baby. This kept the press at bay. For a while. Of course, when the story turned out to be true, the knives were gleaming.
In reality, Madonna had her eye on David Banda, a bright-eyed thirteen-month-old who had no idea that his absorption by one of the world’s richest women would unleash the furies. Heck, I called Madonna a “sluttish, egomaniacal mother-of the-century” who’d “traveled far beyond her bra-baring, intercourse-simulating, public girl-kissing, Jesus-emulating loser antics to grab attention—and flesh.” Phew. I was getting warmed up.
You see, David was no AIDS orphan. He was not even an orphan. In fact, Madonna later admitted to Oprah that he’d been tested for HIV in Africa, and found to be negative. Would she have taken him any other way?
David’s adoption created an international uproar when it was revealed he had a biological father. His mother died shortly after his birth, and the family was too poor to provide adequate nourishment for the baby, who would have survived on breast milk. So the father, Yohane Banda, gave him to an orphanage. He said in interviews he didn’t realize that handing David to Madonna meant that he’d be giving his child “for good.”
In lieu of payment for the baby, Madonna pledged to raise $3 million for orphans through the creation of a center that would preach her pet religion, Kabbalah. Why, I wondered, did Madonna not simply pledge some of that money to help reunite David with his real family?
Local authorities started legal action to block the adoption, but Madonna swept David home to London, where he arrived at the airport in the arms of a nanny. For Madonna, it was now time for image repair.
For this, Madonna put herself in the loving clutches of Oprah Winfrey. Oprah presented her, via satellite, in full floral getup, on her television show.
Madonna went unchallenged when she told her hostess, “I wanted to go into a Third World country, I wasn’t sure where, and give a life to a child who otherwise might not have one.”
Rather than ask tough questions, Oprah burbled, embarrassingly, “and I say, God bless you for that!” and “Bravo!”
As the clock wound down, an approving Oprah heard Madonna condescend sickeningly toward David’s father, calling Yohane Banda “a simple man who comes from a village who has nothing.” Better the kid be raised by a mega-wealthy woman who can buy anybody.
She described a court hearing in which Banda, “looked into my eyes and said to me he was grateful I was going to give his son a life and, had he kept him in the village, he would have buried him.
“I didn’t need any more confirmation that I was doing the right thing and I had his blessing,” she said, telling how the dad signed away the child. Oprah failed to mention that the man could not read.
In 2007, Madonna left Warner Records and signed a $120 million deal with concert promoters Live Nation. But before she could walk, the company made sure to tell the world that Madonna, who still owed the label an album, might as well let the door hit her on the butt.
Warner released a report penned by Bank of America securities analysts with the eye-catching title, “For $120 Million, She’s All Yours.” The report concluded there is “headline risk associated with a Madonna defection. However, the bigger risk would be to overpay for an artist that does not seem to be generating the revenue to support the contract being discussed.” It also pointed out that Madonna will turn sixty years old in the last year of her Live Nation contract.
The deal is “fantastic” for her but does not “make economic sense”.
“Her loss will not meaningfully impact Warner’s near-term sales.”
One word: Ouch.
Surprising no one, in October 2008 Madonna and Guy Ritchie announced they were splitting up, leaving in their imploding union’s wake the dregs of Ritchie’s unsuccessful directing career and rumors of Madonna’s red-hot Kabbalah-fueled love affair with Yankees slugger Alex Rodrigeuz.
13
I’m Not Anti-Semitic; I Just Hate Jews
JIMMY CARTER
It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the road map for peace are accepted by Israel.
—This passage appeared on chapter 30 of Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Simon & Schuster 2006
That was a terribly worded sentence which implied, obviously in a ridiculous way, that I approved terrorism and terrorist acts against Israeli citizens.
—Carter, on that passage
HE’S BEEN CALLED a liar. He’s been called a bigot. He�
��s been called senile, an anti-Semite and even a plagiarist. Aside from the obvious—the man is clearly a liar, a bigot and an anti-Semite—I wish we could blame what ails Jimmy Carter on senility or laziness. The fact is, he knows exactly what he is doing. The one-term president of the United States has crawled out of the dumpster of irrelevancy to reinvent himself as a pretend intellectual fond of writing and uttering the most vicious, false and racist screeds imaginable, and he does so with a smile. At least now people are talking about Jimmy Carter, the most dangerous ex-world leader alive.
James Earl Carter Jr. was born October 1, 1924 in Plains, Georgia, to Earl Carter, a well-to-do farmer, and Lillian, a nurse. Jimmy, as Carter’s long been known, was the first United States president born in a hospital. Modern technology didn’t help him too much, though. He attended Georgia Tech and Jackson State University before receiving a Bachelor’s of Science degree at the United States Naval Academy, serving as a submariner in the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. Carter, who is fond of saying that “Jesus Christ is the driving force” in his life, then set about a career in politics.
He was governor of Georgia when Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency of the United States in 1974. It was an opportunity he could not resist. Carter was nationally unknown when he sold himself to the American people as a Beltway outsider and defeated then-President Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential election. The next four years, by most accounts, were a series of disasters interrupted by calamities.
Before he took the oath of office Carter distinguished himself by becoming the first president to speak to Playboy magazine, in November 1976. He further distinguished himself by issuing an odd, “adultery-in-my-heart” sermon to a periodical that specializes in bare boobs.
Celebutards Page 10
